The Prayer of Caritas read through Advaita Vedānta: a Spiritist prayer and Indian philosophy

Can a Christian prayer, born within Spiritism, be read through the lens of an Indian school of philosophy? That is what a reading proposes, working through the Prayer of Caritas, taking each petition and translating it into the terms of Advaita Vedānta. The prayer, which the Spiritist tradition attributes to a spirit named Caritas and dates to 1873, opens this way: “God, our Father, who art all power and goodness, give strength to the one who undergoes trial.”

Advaita Vedānta is the school that teaches non-duality: the individual and ultimate reality, called Brahman, would not be two different things. For it, suffering is born of ignorance (avidyā) about who one is, and liberation (mokṣa) comes from knowledge of Being, Ātma-jñāna. It is with this key that the reading proceeds. This is an interpretation, not a historical thesis: the prayer was born in a different religious universe, and its encounter with Vedānta is the work of whoever reads it this way.

From the Father to the Self

In the opening invocation, the reading notes that Vedānta recognizes Īśvara, the Lord, as the intelligence that manifests, sustains, and dissolves the universe. The image of Father and child would be merely the first step: one begins by seeing God as an other and ends by recognizing him as the real Self, unlimited and conscious.

The trial mentioned in the prayer is read as the experience of the dual world, made of pain and instability. The strength asked for does not serve to conquer the world, but to go through the process of disidentifying from the ego and understanding oneself as the witness of all experience, not as body or mind.

Light and compassion

The petition for light for whoever seeks the truth is likened to a classic supplication from the Upaniṣads, the tradition's founding texts: Tamaso mā jyotir gamaya, in its usual translation, “lead me from darkness to light.” What illuminates, in this case, is knowing who one is, and that knowledge undoes ignorance. Truth, Vedānta teaches, is not something to be found outside: it is what one is.

The petition for compassion and charity is read as a consequence of knowledge, not merely as a moral virtue. Whoever stops seeing the other as other feels love spring up effortlessly.

The traveler, the afflicted, the orphan

The prayer's subsequent figures are given equivalents. The traveler would be the spiritual seeker, walking among veils of illusion, and the guiding star would be the teacher or the scriptures, telling him that he already is what he seeks. To the afflicted, Vedānta would offer knowledge; to the sick, the mind's rest in a Being that does not fall ill.

The guilty one's repentance stops being moralism and becomes the recognition of the error of identifying with the ego. The child is the immature mind, which needs discipline. The orphan is whoever feels separated from God, and to that person Vedānta would say that the separation never existed.

Goodness over all that exists

When the prayer asks that divine goodness reach everything that was created, the reading evokes the Upanishadic phrase sarvam khalvidam brahma, “all this is Brahman.” Extending goodness to everyone would then be seeing everything as Being itself.

“Thy will be done” would correspond to surrender to the order of dharma, setting aside illusory control and acting with clarity and detachment. The final peace, śāntiḥ, would not come from the world, but from the moment the mind stops resisting reality and rests.

Two languages, one silence

It does not matter whether one says God, Father, Īśvara, or Brahman, the reading concludes: all the names would point to the same inner silence. Vedānta does not reject the prayer; it understands it in depth, as a call of Being to itself.

It is a reading of confluence, not of equivalence. The prayer asks of God; Vedānta answers that the one who asks and the one who listens may be one and the same.